University students need to develop critical reading comprehension skills to better comprehend and analyze texts related to their field of study, be able to exchange knowledge, participate actively in the academic community, and be competitive in the workforce. Understanding specialized texts is essential for developing academic life skills in general as well as in a content based class which require students to be able to make inferences and understand the author’s purpose when writing. Therefore, the explicit teaching of these two critical reading strategies is necessary. Many studies have been conducted on the explicit teaching of reading comprehension strategies. However, any has been aimed at determining if their explicit teaching favors the development of students’ reading comprehension skills at the university level. A mixed research on how the explicit teaching of critical reading strategies favors students’ development of reading skills has been undertaken through the application of interviews, surveys, test results, participant observations and think-alouds. Results showed that after explicit instruction students performed better in their reading assessments. Thus, they indicated that students become more skillful readers by connecting their previous knowledge with text information (making inferences), and by identifying key words that reveal the author’s perspective.